Tangier: A Novel

by Stephen Holgate

  Chaffee glanced at the old woman. Did she realize she had called him by his father’s name?

  She was looking out the window with strange intensity. Was she ill? Had she too lost her nerve and would insist on going back?

  “Pull over. Here.”

  They had been driving along the top of a steep bluff, but here the shoulder widened and he could pull off the road. The car had hardly rolled to a stop before she asked for the keys, pushed open the door and walked to the edge of the precipice.

  He got out and followed her.

  A small valley lay before them. Charlotte looked out over it for some time, shading her eyes with her hand. She peered up and down the road as if looking for someone.

  “Yes, I think this is it,” she said to herself and looked at Chaffee. “Of course I haven’t been here in fifty years.”

  Chaffee looked up and down the empty road. “I don’t understand,” he said.

  But she was somewhere else now, and when she spoke it wasn’t really to him. “Yes, I’m sure this is it.” She gestured toward their car. “Grant was parked here. Or Drake, if you prefer. We stopped and got out of our car, your father and me. I think your father was surprised when he saw Grant. But he figured it out very quickly. He was very smart, your father.” She looked at Chaffee. “Much smarter than you. When I spoke to Grant, your father could see that we had been plotting together. Well, as I said, he was terribly disillusioned. I told Grant to leave, that everything had gone well and I would get his money to him. I think he believed me. Or maybe Grant saw the gun in my hand and thought I was going to shoot him for killing my husband.” She made a face. “Perhaps I should have. But we were business partners. We both liked money a great deal,” she said, as if letting him in on a big secret.

  “Why did he come back to Tangier?” Chaffee asked. “Drake, I mean. Was it just the money?”

  “Isn’t that enough?” Charlotte appeared to think it over. “Does it matter? He was always a little crazy, Grant was. As the war went on he became crazier. Whatever you are, war makes you more of it. The crazy become crazier. The foolish become more foolish. The greedy greedier. He got sent home for killing too many of the wrong people—or the right people at the wrong time. I forget. Years went by. He married. His wife died.” She squinted at Chaffee. “I wonder if he ever told his wife how he felt about young boys?” her shrug carried a contemptuous edge. “He ran through his money. Brooded about it, and decided I had shortchanged him. Somehow he found out where I was. He came by the restaurant with one of his boys and let me know he intended to blackmail me about what we did during the war. As if anyone here cared what I did in the war. But him, ah, he was still afraid that someone here would send him to prison for what he did back then—or what he was doing now. He may have had the two things mixed up.” She blew out a disdainful breath. “Well, that’s how madmen are.”

  “What about my father?”

  “Yes, your father. As I say, by the time Grant drove off, your father understood that Grant and I had duped him. I thought I could talk to him, get him to understand that he could have some of the money, so—”

  She stopped speaking. Distracted, she moved her mouth but no words came out. Finally it came clear in her head and she smiled.

  “As for your father, he was rather like you, I think—very sophisticated, but only when it came to the kind of world he understood. He was not so good at understanding ours. He was a very good man. That was his problem.”

  Charlotte Wald—for it was she and not Charlotte Dubois that Chaffee saw before him—folded her arms over her chest. “Well, as I say, I had just lost my husband at the time. Maybe I hoped your father and I . . . ” She shook her head. “I could be naïve back then, too. I’d hoped he loved me, in spite of everything. But that day, standing here, I saw in his eyes that he hated me. Hated himself a little, too. I’m sure he thought the only way he could make things right was to turn me in. And Grant, too. That’s how he was. He had to try to put things right. Up with good! Down with evil!” She raised her fist in the air, mocking the noble Rene Laurent.

  Her little speech finished, she walked to the edge of the bluff and gazed into the distance for a long time. “So this was where . . . ”

  He waited for her to finish her thought, but she had let it drop.

  “Where what?”

  She turned and looked at him, surprised at his slowness.

  “Where I killed him.”

  She didn’t look away until she was sure he understood. Then she turned once more toward the valley below, its fields turning green after the first autumn rains. “He fell for a very long time—it seemed like forever. Silently. I think he was dead the moment the bullet struck his heart. He didn’t suffer.” She looked at Chaffee. “Isn’t that what people want to hear?”

  Chaffee felt the anesthetic of shock slowly wearing away, allowing him to see at least one truth: whether he wanted it or not, he had what he had come for.

  As he had always feared, he had journeyed all this way for nothing. The man he had never known, who had never known him, had been dead all along, exactly as he had been told when he was a boy. Dead before he was born.

  As the shock faded, the anger rose. He realized he was capable of pushing this woman over the cliff, that it would be no more than she deserved. She seemed to sense it and turned around to face him.

  It took him a moment to see the gun in her hand.

  They stood facing each other for a long time, a few feet apart.

  Chaffee didn’t raise his hands. To hell with her, he thought. Better she should shoot him than that he should make a gesture of submission, a show of fear. He calculated his chances of knocking the gun from her hand, but decided that even an old woman could pull the trigger before he reached her. And he didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of watching him fail at the last thing he ever tried.

  If anyone were to ask her why she had shot him, he knew she would say, “Well, I had to. You can see that.” She had already said the same about his father.

  Yet as he prepared to take the bullet that would finish his story, he saw the certainty in her eyes fade, her resolve falter. The hand with the gun slowly dropped to her side.

  That’s when she laughed. A chilling, light laugh. “No,” she said. “Here.” She offered him the gun tenderly, like a bouquet of flowers. “Take it.”

  It was a small automatic with mother-of-pearl grips. Very pretty. A lady’s gun. Only big enough to kill a man—or a woman. It would have made even less sense for her to raise her hands than it had for him. So she stood with them clasped before her, like a bride at the altar waiting for her groom. She had been waiting a long time.

  Like a hypnotist or a snake charmer, she gazed into his eyes, and he felt his will slipping from him. He would shoot her not out of anger or vengeance, but would do it because that’s what she wished him to do.

  “It’s all right,” she said, her voice gentle, beguiling. “I think my life ended here anyway. I too was shot through the heart, more than fifty years ago. And I’ve been waiting all this time to fall.” She tried to smile. “You can do me this one favor.”

  Chaffee looked at his hand as if it belonged to someone else. He knew that if he pulled the trigger he could exact at least some measure of revenge against all the people who had played on his father’s decency, his honor. His goodness. And by denying him of his father, they had made him the sonofabitch he was.

  No. Too easy. He had chosen his path all by himself.

  “Nobody’s fault but my own,” he muttered.

  The woman stood before him, her eyes open, breathing slowly, evenly.

  In that instant, after fifty-five years of silence, he heard his father speak to him. From an incalculable distance, both very near and very far, Rene Laurent told his son what kind of man he might still be, what course he could choose. “Christopher, don’t do this.” The love in his words was unmistakable, Chaffee thought. Even a man like himself recognized it.

  He lowered
the gun.

  After waiting a little longer, Charlotte Wald frowned.

  “What are you doing? Do you think you’re too good to shoot me?”

  Chaffee took a deep breath, felt something in him float away. With its weight lifted, he smiled in wonder. “Yes. That’s it.”

  With a shout that somehow mixed pain and rage and gratitude and joy, Christopher Chaffee ran toward the edge of the bluff and, with all the fading strength of an aging man, threw the pistol as far as he could.

  The man and woman standing on the precipice watched it fall, tumbling end over end, growing ever smaller until they could see it no more.

  “Yes,” Charlotte Wald sighed, “it would have been too easy. Too easy to die this way. I am condemned to live.” She brought a hand to her mouth. “How I hate my life.”

  She bowed her head and her shoulders began to shake, the same way he had seen whenever she laughed.

  With his last wisp of anger, Chaffee thought to slap the smile from her face. But when she looked up at him he saw that she wasn’t laughing, but weeping. She shook uncontrollably, her wrinkled face folded into a thousand creases. With a shaking hand, she wiped the tears from her face and stared at them glistening on her palm. “Look at that. I’m crying. I’ve been waiting my whole life to cry. Why now?”

  The sight of her tears brought no surge of pity in Chaffee. How dare she weep now? She wasn’t weeping for his father or her husband not even for her precious Hitler. He wanted to tell her that she still cared only about herself, and that she’d better do it well, because no one was going to cry with her. Yet the suspicion stirred in him that, in fact, she was weeping for all of them and for the slow passage of more than fifty years in hell. Each of them, each of the others she had known, had died. Even Drake had made his escape. She, though, instead of dying, had got the money, enough to buy la Crepuscule—The Going Down of the Sun, “where the past comes up to bite you in the ass,” she had told Chaffee the first time he met her.

  As he watched her shoulders shake with sobbing, Chaffee felt his own legs tremble and slowly fold up under him. He settled onto the ground, wrapped his arms around his knees like a small boy, bowed his head, and felt the tears run down his cheeks. He wept for his father and his mother. For his stepfather, who had deserved better by him. For Draper, whose contented life he had upended. For Drake. He wept for violating the rules of the agency placed under his trust. And he wept for the sonsabitches at the Washington Post for being right about him. He wept for his stunted life and for each time he had blamed it on his father.

  Like Charlotte Wald, he was weeping for himself—both of them weeping for the better people they might have been.

  A car passed. Chaffee wondered what its passengers made of the sight of an old woman standing at the edge of the road and a middle-aged man sitting in the dirt, both of them weeping as if their hearts would break.

  There are only so many tears to shed, especially for the old. Charlotte stopped first, wrung out by a combination of exhaustion, despair, and a strange sort of exaltation, rather like after making love.

  Finally, Chaffee, too, wiped his face with his hands and got to his feet.

  Again they stood facing each other, but now drained of both emotion and words. She took a deep breath, a breath that started shakily but ended with a curious calmness. She wiped her hands on her skirt, shook her head to clear it, and stood erect, calm.

  Christopher Chaffee nodded toward the car. “I suppose we should start back.”

  To his surprise, she shook her head. “No, I can’t. But you—for you it’s time to go home.” Her voice was surprisingly sure. “You’ve found as much truth as there is to find, far more than you deserve. Has it set you free? I think not. Truth is like a forest fire. It consumes everything. I’ve lived with the truth burning inside me every day for all these years, until there is nothing left of me.” She threw the keys at him. “There. Now go away.”

  Chaffee looked at the keys lying in the dust in front of him.

  “You needn’t worry about me. No one will harm me,” she told him. “I’m cursed with immortality. You were right to throw away the gun. It was of no use. I am not allowed to die. My offenses are too great.”

  “How will you—?”

  She laughed a free and bitter laugh. “I’ll walk. This road has been my Via Dolorosa for more than fifty years. If I can get to the end of it maybe I will finally earn my redemption. Now go!”

  He knew she was right, knew what he had to do. He needed to drive away and leave her.

  That’s what freedom is, he thought, knowing what it was you have to do.

  ENVOI

  The plane hit turbulence somewhere over the Atlantic, waking Christopher Chaffee from a dream. He and the three hundred other souls on board journeyed through the brief night of a westward flight. The cabin was dark, illumined only by a scattering of lights shining above those who wished to read, or who preferred a bit of light to keep the darkness at bay.

  Before he left, he had said his goodbyes to Draper and Mansour, to Erickson and Sands and Malika. It was a short list. For all the time he had spent in Morocco, he hadn’t met many people.

  He didn’t spend much time on apologies. No one asked for one, and he knew that he could find no apology adequate to redeem the mistakes he had made. Instead, he worked on forgiving those to whom he could not say goodbye.

  What was it someone had said? Forgiveness is giving up on having a better past.

  Charlotte Dubois—Charlotte Wald—had been right. The truth does not set you free. You have to set yourself free, give up on the things you punish yourself with even while you think that, somehow, you are punishing others.

  When he got home he would have to go to his mother and tell her that her husband was dead, had been dead all these years. She needn’t have felt any guilt in marrying Dalton. No one needed to feel any guilt. They would somehow have to get along without it.

  Funny, he hadn’t thought about his old job in days, had stopped dwelling on his own losses. Would it come back on him? Probably so, but a little less painfully each time.

  And he had the indictment to face when he got back. Was he guilty? Of course he was. Deptford would do what he could, but he would likely have to plead. Plead forgiveness for his crimes, both legal and moral, plead to a judge, and to the many others whose trust he had betrayed, whose lives he had made worse. No, he’d never have the opportunity to ask forgiveness of all of them. He’d have to live with that, too.

  His mother would die soon now, he was sure of it. She, too, would get her release and go home. And he would go home too, to Julie, and tell her how much he loved her and what a lucky man he was.

  While the plane flew through the short night, Chaffee reflected on all the things he had been during his life. Most of them pretty awful. He might yet have time to become a good man. He’d tried everything else.

  He looked around at his fellow travelers, most of them asleep, and took a deep, cleansing breath. He leaned his head back against the seat and dozed off again, picking up his dream where he had left it, the dream of the pistol he had thrown, Charlotte Dubois’ pistol. Once more he watched it falling, falling away, until it disappeared from sight and came to rest amongst his father’s bones.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Even when my study door is shut, I’m never working alone. I want to thank my tireless agent, Kimberley Cameron for her support and her unflagging efforts. I also want to thank the keen-eyed editor Kristina Blank Makansi, founder of Blank Slate Press for her hard work and patience, and to Amphorae Publishing’s Donna Essner. My thanks, too, to Mark Jacobs, good friend and short story writer extraordinaire, for reading an early draft and making a number of helpful suggestions. I also wish to thank all the good people at the Multnomah County Library for always knowing the right way, and pointing me to it.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  A native Oregonian and current Portland resident, Stephen Holgate served for four years as a diplomat with the American Embas
sy in Morocco. In addition to his other Foreign Service posts, Mr. Holgate has served as a Congressional staffer; headed a committee staff of the Oregon State Senate; managed two electoral campaigns; acted with the national tour of an improvisational theater group; worked as a crew member of a barge on the canals of France; and lived in a tent while working as a gardener in Malibu.

  Holgate has also published several short stories and successfully produced a one-man play, as well as publishing innumerable freelance articles. Tangier is his first novel. His second, Madagascar, is due out in 2018.